#literally the appeal in the first place

[anongalactic]

need to draw spanlucci art but i will NOT yaoify them,,,, that is to say, lucci in all his model gorgeousness and then the gross yucky sewer rat man he's stuck with. It will not happen i will break the cycle.

[davidtennantpussytulpa]

THIS IS SO EVIL. if its from the same user then spam reblogs are something unique to this site and can be used for fun or to get a point across. but even worse is if that it targets the same post from different blogs. i follow the blogs i follow for a reason. i LIKE to see their posts. even if ive already seen it from someone else. because they could have something new to say. or i know who likes what. literally dont do this its the worst decision

[dayurno]

[bitchthefuck1]

I will never understand the fanfic impulse to take characters with thee most coo coo bananas codependent/nuanced/toxic/insane relationship and turn them into love interests #1 and #2 in a generic romance novel. like what is even the point anymore

[missmaywemeetagain]

Pink Scarf Elvis PART 3!

August 1st, 1969, International Hotel, Las Vegas

The more of these I find, the more obsessed I become.

[Story time! The famed black suit/pink scarf pics were taken at a press conference directly after Elvis’ very first performance back in Vegas in 1969. He hadn’t performed live, other than the small audience for the 68 Special, in like 8+ years. Apparently, he had a massive panic attack before the show, delaying the performance by like 2 hours, but when he finally made it out, he absolutely slayed. I think all those endorphins from such a wild roller coaster of an evening have something to do with how he absolutely GLOWS in the photos from this press conference. That’s a man wildly proud/relieved/excited to be doing what he was born to do!]

[punk-pandame]

why is it so fucking hard to get approved for a medication specifically designed for the disease i'm fucking diagnosed with what the absolute FUCK

[bunkernine]

society if hoo had them at uni age and the lost trio went to chb and chiron is like "how tf are ANY of u alive and unclaimed". wilderness was just community college.

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

.

[leggyre]

the cartoon shenanigans of today's episode

[swordmaid]

AM thinking that if shri’iia had not been kidnapped by the nautiloid she would’ve still been tadpoled and enthralled by the absolute just because they were targeting drows and I’m thinking shri’iia’s matriarch had told her to investigate the drows that have disappeared like specifically a baenre highborn and her army disappeared when they went to the surface? that’s sus and her matriarch is like in everyone’s business anyway. SO in like a companion au if she isn’t recruited, shri’iia become one of the absolute goons you see in moonrise. probably a guard or something. likewise, i like to imagine in her playthrough she’s kind of like 🧍‍♂️ once they’ve visited moonrise and she saw that most of the guards there were the drows she was sent out to investigate. kind of like oh so THATS what happened to them. then when she finds that journal in ketheric’s desk talking abt how they were specifically targeting drow exiles she’s like …huh.

[neuronspider]

call me a hater or smth idc anymore i'm just gonna say that i really, really fucking hate bonten timeline it's so overrated for a timeline that has only gotten like 2 chapters tops lmao you can't even call it an arc

(bonten gang-centric rant on the tags lmao i honestly can't remember much about the main characters during that time to even talk about it)

[imagineagreatadventure]

why the american healthcare system is a joke:

I have amazing health insurance and after I fell recently I still have had to pay over $2-3k on the ambulance & surgeries and dental work because no one in my insurance network would see me on an emergency basis because doctors are the worst.

[oreolesbian]

the duffer brothers…want to make (yet another!) live-action death note…for the love of god leave that series alone 😭

[strawbebyjam]

thinking abt how agar tum saath ho was my oh-god-i-hope-i-never-feel-like-that song and now it’s the oh-shit-that’s-where-things-are-and-will-stay song

[vetyr]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

[communistkenobi]

They put Tayy Dior’s name in quotes as if that was a fun little nickname her friends called her. It places emphasis on the fact that her name is ‘unofficial,’ and given that legal name changes in places like the US can be expensive, difficult & time consuming, the ‘unofficial’ nature of transgender peoples’ names is commonplace. Using deadnames of trans people in media reports is an endorsement of the difficult nature of this process.

It also highlights the absurdity of appealing to ‘official’ legal records of name and gender marker - which official records? even when you go through a legal name change process, it’s not a single application that changes it everywhere. At least in my experience in Canada, and I believe this is the case in other federated states, you have to separately change your photo ID(s), your birth certificate, your federal/national records, your tax records, your employment and tenant records, your bank records, your billing records, and so on. These are all separate applications/appointments. And legal name and gender marker are separate applications. I had to essentially obtain a set of permission slips from a provincial office that allowed me to change my name and gender marker on municipal, provincial, and federal records. There isn’t one single ‘official’ record that informs all other records of your ‘real’ name and gender marker, it is a collection of diffused departments & offices that do not communicate with one another and must be altered one at a time by the individual themselves. In many cases, states retain a record of your original name and gender marker even after applying for a change, meaning it is literally impossible to ever fully change your name and gender everywhere, administratively speaking.

So, which record is the ‘official’ record for trans people? Cis people treat ‘official’ records of legal names and gender markers as if they are uniform, centralised, and coherent in order to contrast the ‘unofficial’ nature of a trans person’s “preferred” name and pronouns, to highlight the fundamental fraudulence of our lives that go against the rational objective nature of the state, but there is in many states no single official record, for trans and non-trans people alike. That is because when cis people insist on calling trans people by their deadnames and ungender them, they are not actually referring to official records - as official records can conflict, and there is no agreement on which single record is the authoritative one - but are instead treating sex and name assignment at birth as if it is sacrosanct. This first ritual of naming, of gendering, and of recording the results of this ritual is the actual ‘official record’ they are referring to, a ritual that can never be altered or forsaken.

Tayy Dior’s name is not a nickname, it is not a quotation to insert into her “real” “official” deadname, it is not a preference. It is her name, and the media - even “trans inclusive” media - is making sure that it is, at best, the second thing they call her as they gleefully report on her violent murder